Three years later some of his friends from Kolhapur persuaded him to appear for the Maharashtra Public Service Commission exam. ‘Just like that—I was in my twenties, everything then seemed like a dare—I said okay.’ He ranked fourteenth in the state and joined the police, even though the lecturer’s pay was better and the job afforded him ample time to pursue interests like reading and volleyball. ‘But this [policing] is the only job where you are in constant contact with the public and have the power to help.’
‘Also,’ he added with a hint of a smile, ‘I now have a better appreciation of the angry ranting in Paradise Lost.’
Inspector Raorane’s first posting was at Worli, where he moved in with his sister who lived next door to the police station. ‘Her young children were very attached to me and often followed me into the police station, like these kids roaming here. But all day long they heard me shout or being rough, I didn’t want them to see that, grow up to that, so I asked for a transfer to the traffic control branch.’
Here, he was to again meet Rakesh Maria, then the deputy commissioner of police. This was a little before the 1993 blasts when Maria got the lead to Tiger Memon and moved out of traffic to take over the blasts probe. ‘Boss,’ said Inspector Raorane admiringly, ‘works with an inspector’s instinct. He is not an ivory-tower man; he has great grasp of the grassroots as also a detective’s skills.’
He himself picked up some of those during a stint with the Special Branch, which was considered a ‘punishment posting’ within the force as it entailed mostly paperwork, and almost no opportunity to skim cream. ‘I once got an application for an arms licence; while checking the applicant’s antecedents I found police files on his family dating back to the British. It was an instance of very fine record-keeping. I realized that’s how those people were, meticulous, detailed, and mind you, this was before computers and typewriters. I was greatly inspired, thinking that if you are honest to your job this is how well you can do it.’
When Unit IX senior inspector Ashok Borkar returned from Rakesh Maria’s office on the night of May 9 (hours after Amarnath Grover had met him) and told his men about a missing complaint that needed to be investigated, Inspector Raorane didn’t pay much heed. ‘I thought it was for someone else to follow.’
But as he lived closest to Malad where the missing complaint was registered—in this city of impossible traffic, that was an important consideration—he was nominated to lead the investigation. Helping him were the others in the unit: Assistant Inspector Sunil Ghosalkar, Sub-Inspectors Mahesh Tawade, Sagar Shivalkar, Sanjiv Gawade, Dilip Deshmukh, and Dilip Bhosle, Police Naik Nandkumar Naik, and Head Constable Sadanand Gurav.
They were a fine mesh—each man bringing his own special skills to bear on the case eventually.
Borkar, who was proceeding on a brief vacation, warned Inspector Raorane before leaving, ‘Boss is really keen to find out what happened to this guy.’ Ghosalkar and Naik had already begun the hunt for Neeraj, accompanying Amarnath Grover to mortuaries, hospitals and even to the Borivali National Park. Inspector Raorane, still sceptical about what he could bring to the case, began with a visit to the Malad police station to get copies of any statements recorded. The case was still at an inquiry stage, and a senior IPS officer had already called the Malad police asking them to go slow on Maria.
Inspector Raorane saw that a missing complaint had been registered by Neeraj’s cousin, and the police had recorded the statements of Neeraj’s friends, among them Nishant Lal, as well as Emile Jerome and Maria Susairaj. Maria was the last recorded person to have seen the missing man. An FIR for kidnapping by unknown persons was eventually filed by Amarnath Grover only on May 20, when it seemed certain that something dire had happened to his son.
Neeraj, Maria had told the police, had come to her house after 10.30 pm on the night of May 6, but left at 1.30 am following several calls from his friends. One of these, she alleged, was from Nisha, a former colleague at Balaji Telefilms, who insisted that Neeraj come over, saying to him, ‘Aa jao, naya maal aaya hai’ (Come, fresh stuff is here). Maria was to later insinuate that Neeraj was hooked to recreational drugs.
Before leaving Dheeraj Solitaire Neeraj ordered dinner for them from Sai Sagar Hotel and attended to several other calls, including the nightly call from his mother. It was only in the morning she realized, Maria said, that Neeraj had left his cellphone behind, which was charging in the bedroom. ‘I scrolled through the phonebook, found Nishant Lal’s number and informed him that Neeraj had left his phone behind.’ Neeraj’s phone then became the most vital clue in the police investigation.
Emile also later told Inspector Raorane that ‘Maria was alone in the flat’ when he arrived at Dheeraj Solitaire on the morning of May 7 a little after seven in the morning, adding that he had ‘never seen Neeraj Grover’. The first and the only time he had spoken to Neeraj, he said, was when he had called Maria from Kochi, and she had asked him to call on Neeraj’s phone as her phone battery was dying. This would be Emile’s legal stance right through the trial.
The statements were straightforward. ‘But,’ said Inspector Raorane, ‘it struck me as quite odd that someone like Neeraj, by all accounts a very sociable guy, would leave his phone behind and not even call. He could have done that from anywhere, a friend’s cellphone, a public booth. If he had mistakenly left his phone behind he would have definitely called Maria to check.’
On the morning of May 12, six days after Neeraj’s disappearance, Inspectors Raorane and Ghosalkar stopped by at Maria’s house on their way to work. This was standard practice, he said. ‘The last person with whom a missing or dead person has been seen is a natural suspect, that’s textbook training.’
Maria’s tiny flat was full. Apart from her, Inspector Raorane counted her mother, an aunt, Veronica, and Richard. The actress had summoned her family as soon as Emile left for Kochi on May 9, telling them that the police was harassing her because her friend Neeraj had gone missing. At that point the Malad police had only recorded her and Emile’s statements just as they had the statements of the rest of Neeraj’s friends. Perhaps the idea of going back alone to the flat where Neeraj had lain dead forty-eight hours ago was unpalatable.
Inspector Raorane, his keen eyes missing nothing, played the mild-mannered cop. ‘We were in the flat for about twenty minutes, asking routine questions.’ But once the formalities were over there came the pointed questions about the deep gashes on both her palms, and the bruises that had so distracted Kiran earlier when she and Emile had gone to borrow his car. Maria explained away the injuries to her hands saying they were sustained while using a grater to scrape vegetables. ‘I thought to myself, if this is what can happen cooking just one meal, how will this girl manage for the rest of her life?’
‘And these bruises?’ Ghosalkar chipped in. There wasn’t a hint of coyness in her response: ‘Those are love bites. My fiancé Emile was in town, and we got romantic…’
‘But you know,’ Inspector Raorane said rolling his eyes, ‘we are also married people hanh!’
Something was amiss—what exactly he couldn’t put a finger on—but he’d been reeled in. ‘I was hooked to the case.’
One by one, the officers of Unit IX began calling in Neeraj’s friends—Nishant, Deepak Kumar, Haresh—grilling them for hours, and also trying to get a sense of Neeraj’s personality. All their stories were of a piece. Police Naik Nandkumar, who was still hunting for Neeraj with Amarnath Grover, told Inspector Raorane, ‘He doesn’t seem the kind of man who will just go missing. He likes his work, his girlfriends, family, and friends. He belongs too much to this world.’
Nandkumar was sharp, patient, and hard-working, and usually his observations were germane. Inspector Raorane paid heed. ‘We were working by elimination. If Neeraj was not the sort to wander off then someone else had to be involved in the case. If so who, and why? I began to concentrate on that.’
Rakesh Maria’s instincts, as usual, proved razor sharp. When Neeraj’s friends, frustrated by th
e police’s inability to locate him, went to the Crime Branch boss to complain, he confidently pointed a finger at Maria Susairaj. ‘You, madam, are my suspect number one.’
‘It set them aflutter,’ he recalled, smiling at the memory. He repeated his claim a few days later when Maria, this time accompanied by Richard, met him again to ask for permission to leave Mumbai for a while. ‘Our parents were anxious back home in Mysore, and our grandfather was ailing,’ recalled Richard. ‘Give us time, we told him, and we’ll come back whenever you need us. But Rakesh Maria just looked at us and said there was no way he could let us leave town as Moni was his prime suspect.’
‘How can you say that? What proof do you have against me?’ Maria had remonstrated. Rakesh Maria’s attention, like the others before him, was arrested by the darkening bruises and gashes on her hands. ‘Get a medical done on that Susairaj girl,’ he called Unit IX as soon as Maria and Richard walked out of his office. The medical reports indicated that the injuries came from a sharp object like a knife, and not the serrated surface of a vegetable grater.
Amarnath Grover, meanwhile, was becoming tired, anxious, suspicious, and very, very afraid. It had been six days since Ginni had gone missing, and the police had nothing to offer: no clue, no comfort. After some private sleuthing, he arrived at his own deductions. When Inspector Ghosalkar, befriended during the long fruitless search across Mumbai, asked if he suspected anyone of wanting to hurt Neeraj, Amarnath Grover told him of his terrible suspicions about Nishant Lal.
Neeraj was a strapping fellow and of his friends only Nishant Lal was big enough to harm him physically, he said. Also, he was disturbed by the mumbo-jumbo that Nishant had told him the previous day about a tarot card reader whom he had consulted for Neeraj’s whereabouts.
‘The tarot card reader pulled out a death card and said that Neeraj was tied up somewhere and crying out for help,’ he had told Amarnath Grover. Then, seeing the old man overcome with emotion, Nishant had leaned forward and requested him to return to Kanpur. ‘The police is doing everything they can and we’re here to keep a tab on them. Uncle, please go home and you can come back as soon as there is any information.’
‘I find his talk strange,’ confided Amarnath Grover, his sense of reason clouded by his anxiety. ‘Neeraj is so popular with girls; perhaps Nishant is jealous of that.’
At Ghosalkar’s instruction he invited Nishant Lal to Neeraj’s flat at Seven Bungalows the next evening where, following a prearranged signal, a team of eight plainclothes policemen grabbed and bundled the young man into a waiting Bolero.
It was to be the only misstep in the entire investigation.
Amarnath Grover was woken up the next morning by a furious Deepak Kumar, who accused him of causing harm to Nishant when all he had done was try to be kind and helpful. The police had detained Nishant through the night, Amarnath Grover realized, with all its attendant implications. ‘I am sorry,’ he told Deepak. ‘But the police asked me for suspects, and I was forced to comply.’
Nishant himself never spoke of it again, and was one of the strongest prosecution witnesses.
The morning after Inspector Raorane’s visit to her flat, Maria was asked to appear at the Unit IX office in Bandra. It is a smallish space with warren-like rooms, tucked away behind the sprawling police station on a main thoroughfare almost as an afterthought. Maria arrived at 10.30 am ‘like a star on a film set’, recalled Inspector Raorane, with minders Richard and Veronica in tow. She was directed to a hard wooden bench in the corridor outside and made to wait for the next four hours.
Interrogations are at their heart about power, and the interplay between the interrogator and the interrogated. Physical intimidation is the standard tactic, and employed on poor, petty, or hardened criminals, though after the outcry raised by human rights organizations cops are more careful to camouflage their efforts. For instance, a suspect will be wrapped in a cold towel before he’s caned so that there are no visible marks on his person. At other times just a few words delivered with the right amount of menace can suffice. There’s the story of a famous encounter cop with a dizzying body count against his name who just had to walk in, cock an eyebrow, and ask, ‘Cooper, ya upar?’ for the other person to start blabbering. (Cooper is a large municipal hospital in suburban Mumbai.)
But brute intimidation is also unsophisticated and has its limitations, forcing policemen to evolve more refined methods. When he was probing the 1993 blasts Rakesh Maria was known to offer suspects kilos of jalebi, but he’d stop his hospitality at that, refusing them even a drop of water thereafter. Try eating several jalebis without a sip of water to know what exquisite torture that is. ‘All this maar-dhaad is outdated,’ Inspector Raorane told me. ‘You have to read the profile of the person you are questioning and raise yourself to that level.’
After making Maria wait, Inspector Raorane called her in with all the warmth of an apologetic host. She came across as composed, confident, and willing to answer all questions. While Richard and Veronica waited outside, stressed about the elapsing hours, Maria and Inspector Raorane chatted away about her likes and dislikes, her life, her career, her ambitions. He found her rather well read. Like Emile she favoured books on Christianity, and also crime thrillers. He let her move around the room, answer phone calls. ‘Her body language suggested over-confidence—she would stroll around the place as if she was in command. At no point did I believe what she said, but I never let it show. It wasn’t anything like an interrogation,’ said the investigator. Since he had no evidence against her they let her go home. This would become a pattern over the next eight days.
Simultaneously Unit IX and the Malad police began to verify the nature of Maria’s relationship with Neeraj, her past, as also her statements to the police. Choreographer Deepak Singh told them how she had come to stay at his house but spent all her nights with Neeraj. The Coffee House Nomads confirmed their public display of intimacy at the party at D’Ultimate, and Neeraj’s roommate Haresh Sondarva told the police that Neeraj and Maria slept together. Her ex-boyfriends were scrutinized. Manish was questioned on the phone, Inspector Raorane debated summoning the well-known actor she had been involved with, and called Rakesh Maria for advice. ‘Does he have a direct bearing with Neeraj Grover’s disappearance?’ the senior officer asked.
‘At this point I am not sure, sir,’ said Raorane.
‘In that case, let it be. The media will needlessly get something to chase. Let’s instead focus on the other facts of the case.’
‘From everything we gathered about her, all that boys’ talk about women with dark circles seemed to be true,’ Inspector Raorane said grinning snarkily, briefly letting his guard down.
‘What about women with dark circles? You mean they should be using eye cream?’ I responded flippantly.
‘That they are highly sexed.’ He seemed genuinely puzzled as I looked at him incredulously. ‘Don’t you women too have theories about men?’
When it was her turn to be questioned, Nisha Borilkar denied having called Neeraj over to Nishant Lal’s place as Maria had claimed in her first statement. She’d spoken to Neeraj on the night of May 6, Nisha admitted, but it was to check his whereabouts and find out how he was doing. She also complained about Emile browbeating her at Malad police station where they had all gone to record their statement on May 8. ‘He kept telling me to stop lying and accept that I had called Neeraj over, that I had told him naya maal aaya hai,’ she told Inspector Raorane. ‘Nothing of the sort had happened.’
Each night, the Unit IX boys got together over dinner to discuss the day’s proceedings, relishing the prospects of a complex case. It was to become their daily ritual, analysing, summing up, planning the next day’s strategy. They were not entirely sure about Maria’s involvement in Neeraj’s disappearance, but of the available people she seemed the most promising. It was a game of wearing her down: she would come with Richard and Veronica, be made to wait, sometimes for hours, before being called in for the cat-and-mouse questioning. On
ly the persistence with which Inspector Raorane questioned her belied his conversational tone, reminding her that this was no drawing room conversation. But while Maria kept her nerve—‘she was a tough cookie,’ admitted Rakesh Maria—Richard was beginning to lose his.
‘They would call us at nine in the morning, letting us go only past midnight,’ he told me, still harrowed by the memory of those nine days. ‘They kept asking my sister Roni and I what we knew of Moni’s life in Mumbai. I remember getting angry, it was just a missing complaint after all and with what authority were they interrogating us and to this extent!
‘The cops kept telling us that if Monica knew something she should reveal it fast and that we should convince her to do so, and we kept asking her why the police was hounding her, but all she kept saying was, “If there was anything, I would have told you.” We thought an evil eye had befallen our family and we told ourselves, let us go through this with grace.’
When I told Inspector Raorane what Richard had said about being in the dark, he let out a cynical laugh. ‘You believe him, that the family did not know what had happened, hanh?’ His trademark ‘hanh’ conveyed a multitude of emotions.
Inspector Raorane, taking his cue from the Susairaj family’s strong Christian ties, changed tack, often leading his discussion with Maria to a religious plane, talking to her about the afterlife and doomsday. ‘To be able to speak on all this I must say I am grateful for my education,’ he said. ‘Daily main use apna cassette sunaata tha.’
‘Why do Christians go for confession?’ Inspector Raorane would ask Maria. ‘So we can go to the Almighty with open hands and hearts. But we’re pawns on a chessboard, the Almighty makes us commit things, doesn’t he?’
She responded to that with a serene smile. And the last thing he said to her on the night before he let her go, ‘Maria, we all have to die and face God, think of yourself as a human being who is a part of God.’
Death in Mumbai Page 16